


Guess I'm Young

by mywholecry



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/M, Family, Isolated, Memories, Quiet, Road Trip, Romance, Vacation, outside the city, written pre-knowledge of anything about Chuck's mom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 13:36:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mywholecry/pseuds/mywholecry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two hours outside city limits and a sunrise over a smoggy skyline, Blair realizes this isn't going to be a day trip. The radio is playing white static noise over smooth concrete, and Chuck doesn't move at all, hands gripping the steering wheel. She hmm's and sighs and pulls her legs up to rest them on the dashboard, dress rucking up over her thighs. </p><p>"I'm here against my will," she reminds him, angling her head to check her hair in the rearview mirror.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guess I'm Young

**notes** : just archiving some old stuff from 2009. I think this won a contest at the now deleted Gossip Ink. 

Blair is too good at everything. Blair drinks alcohol that's older than her mother. Blair stomp stomps on little boy hearts and smiles without a trace of lipstick on her teeth. She crosses her legs at the ankles, curls her toes at the foot of her bed. The world is spread out beneath the arch of her feet, waiting for her to pick and choose. 

She's not going to lie, not to herself, though when other people are around she will sigh and complain: it's good to be queen. 

* 

She is used to waking up with Chuck somewhere near, close enough to touch fingers to his chest, neck, hipbone. It's not like this, though, waking up before the sun is even out to Chuck opening her door, nothing more than his silhouette visible in the New York City light (headlights, spotlights, pale yellow and no moon at all). 

"I'm stealing you," Chuck says, and she sits up, brushes hair away from her face. She thinks that her skin is feeling tight, too aware of the bra she fell asleep in sliding down against the top of her ribcage. 

"Do I want to know what you're talking about?" she murmurs, already pulling the covers away to look for clothes, because she has seen that look on Chuck's face before, full of shadows, insistent. It was the kind of look he carried around on scattered days when he would smell like whiskey, when he would find her after school, and she would let him leave bite marks on her collarbone, down her waist. 

He doesn't say anything, watches as she pulls on the first dress she sees, toes into flats that have already gone out of style, because for all she knows, he's taking her on a nature hike through Central Park. Chuck's weird when he's in these moods, and she's not sacrificing any of her heels to his cause. 

* 

Two hours outside city limits and a sunrise over a smoggy skyline, Blair realizes this isn't going to be a day trip. The radio is playing white static noise over smooth concrete, and Chuck doesn't move at all, hands gripping the steering wheel. She hmm's and sighs and pulls her legs up to rest them on the dashboard, dress rucking up over her thighs. 

"I'm here against my will," she reminds him, angling her head to check her hair in the rearview mirror. They're passing through a suburb, and she watches miniature rancher dream homes pass by one after the other, and Chuck never says a word. If it was anyone else, she would be worried that he was taking her out where nobody could hear her scream, but, by this point, she knows better. Chuck would never get his hands dirty like that, and she can see that the look on his face is even less normal than potentially homicidal, almost seems to say help. 

* 

At some point, Blair falls asleep, and at another she wakes up, her neck throbbing dully from where her face was turned inelegantly into the window. The car is stopped, and Chuck is standing outside pumping gas, and she is filled with the sudden, funny urge to run, make this interesting. Instead, she watches him and pulls her legs down, bones protesting the movement. 

He looks almost perfectly out of place, a Cary Grant figure in black and white while people wander by with novelty t-shirts and kids with dirty faces resting on their hips. Blair is struck, almost, with the realization that they could never really call another place home, not after New York City, that she's letting Chuck take her away from there without even questioning it. When he gets back, he wipes hands on the knees of his slacks, says, quietly, "Not long now." 

"To where, exactly?" she asks, and she doesn't get an answer, and she didn't really expect one. 

* 

Eventually, they stop in front of a Victorian house painted in muted blues and greys, and Blair says, "Is this yours," and, "of course it's yours. How many houses do you own?" 

Chuck says, "Mother didn't like to stay in one place." He gets out of the car, and Blair follows a few moments later, trying to figure out her steps. Chuck has never mentioned his mother before, not to her, and that has to mean something scary and important. She's never been good at empathy, but she knows how to try when she needs to. 

Inside, everything has a thin silver sheen of dust when Chuck pulls all the curtains open. It looks like the dollhouse she stopped playing with after her mother told her she was too old, everything perfect and untouched. If she were a different person, she would tell him how beautiful she thinks it is, or maybe ask him if this is where he used to disappear in the summer when they were kids, but instead she runs two fingers over a table and can't find the words to say anything. 

* 

Blair spends a day exploring the house, testing out furniture and cooing softly over closets full of dresses covered in plastic and practicing her unimpressed face for when she finds Chuck again. She eventually stumbles on him in the kitchen to find that he's grocery shopped and has Chinese takeout that has more calories than Blair cares to think about. She eats the steamed broccoli, and they on either side of a long, long table. She has to raise her voice to ask him, "Are you going to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing here?" 

He smiles one of those patented Chuck Bass smiles, the kind that she would never admit still makes her heart feel like it's trying to get out of her chest, and he says, "Don't you need to get out of the city once in awhile, Waldorf?" 

"So you took me from my room at four in the morning for a vacation." 

"Sure," Chuck says, "let's call it that." 

* 

When Chuck goes off to a bedroom later, Blair follows him without thinking about it. He tosses her a nightgown and ignores her: "Was this your mother's? Is this some Oedipal issue you've been hiding?" She changes, anyway, forgetting to care that they aren't dating anymore when she unhooks her bra and lets it fall from her shoulders. He doesn't look at her until she crawls into bed with him. They touch hands to hand and feet to feet, lightly, and she presses in close enough to press her forehead into the junction of his neck and shoulders before going to sleep. 

* 

Blair spends a long time going through photo albums full of pictures of a dark-haired woman with Chuck's eyes and a smile like Serena when she really means it. She sees Chuck wandering through the house with glasses of scotch, and she wants to ask him about her, but that means he would either get angry and ignore her or there would be some sort of epic, sentimental bonding moment that she's not sure she's prepared to deal with. 

At night, Blair thinks about Chuck's mouth on her stomach, teeth scraping a hipbone. Blair thinks about Stockholm Syndrome, about how nobody has tied her to a bedpost, about how she made the choice to follow him out here. If this is just one of Chuck's moods, then it's different, deeper, something that makes his eyes (when she can meet them, and even then she just says something bitchy to beat the echo) hurt, actually hurt. 

"Do you come out here a lot?" she asks, softly, when her mouth is resting up against his collarbone and his hand is rubbing over silk at her lower back. 

"Every year," he murmurs. 

* 

Blair breaks, the next day. She finds Chuck drinking behind a desk in an office, and she perches on top of it, kicking out gently so her bare feet brush against his knee. 

"Tell me about her," she says, and it looks like he almost gets up to leave, but he settles back against his chair. She bites at the corner of her lip until he starts to speak, and a little voice in her head says negotiating with your captor? and giggles hysterically. Chuck tells her about coming to this house with his mother's parents, about them telling him stories about her. Blair's never seen him sound so human before, and she nods along with everything and hooks her ankle around his leg when he starts to talk about what her father would say about her ("She always hated the city, hated it, but my father had an image to maintain that she had to fit into if she wanted to be a Bass."), after she died. 

When Chuck grows quiet again, Blair doesn't know what to do, so she moves into his lap and wraps arms around his neck and says, "You never told anyone." 

He presses lips against her neck, and he holds on. 

* 

Blair thinks she might change a little, when she's away from obligations and city noise and lines of hopeful girl faces waiting for her approval. She spends more time with Chuck, and they don't try to kill each other. It takes them five days alone to finally kiss, and it's Blair, it's Blair taking Chuck's face in her hands and biting at his lower lip until he makes a noise. He backs her up against the brocade wallpaper in the office that night and kisses her and kisses her, and she wraps a hand in the hair at the nape of his neck, messy now like it never is, and says, "This doesn't have to mean anything." 

"It always means something with us," he whispers, into her mouth, and she lets him undress her with the lights streaming in from the open window, and she let him lay her out on the desk. She's always fought during sex, but he's got two fingers, three fingers inside of her, and all she wants to do is get more of him, more skin on hers. She tugs at him until he pulls his fingers away and lines their bodies up, cold skin at knees and arms and faces pressed together until they start to sweat. When he's inside of her again, she wraps her legs behind his knees and keens a little, softly, into his neck, and it always means something. 

* 

"Do you want to go back to New York?" he asks, when they're dressed again, and he takes her hand and runs his thumb over her knuckles. Blair shuffles closer. He's freeing her, telling her that she's allowed to run home and forget this ever happened, hate him again. She presses an open mouthed kiss to the edge of his jaw. 

"Not yet," she says, and it sounds like a promise, and she smiles when Chuck smiles first.


End file.
